Don't Call it a Hot Streak

I'll grant you this - coming off of a 3-2 win last night that raised Chris Carpenter's record to 13-3 on the season, the Cardinals have now won 9 of their last 10 and have taken a 6 game lead on the Cubs in the NL Central. Carp might be having his best season, statistically, of his entire career (only 20 walks in 20 starts!) But don't call it a hot streak. The Cards are now beating teams that they are supposed to beat and winning the games that they should win. After enduring a brutal schedule for the first 4 months of the season, the team has enjoyed a much more relaxing August, playing the majority of their games this month against sub-.500 teams while mixing in 5 off-days. The Cardinals are just a good team doing what good teams do right now.

I received a second package from Mark of Stats on the Back today after having one of his packages queued up to write about already. The first package featured a bunch of cards from a random giveaway where people could write in requests for certain stuff - even some very specific requests seemed to be encouraged. For my part, I believe I requested Darryl Kile cards (my collection is woefully lacking) and any traded set or oddball Cardinals.

Here's a DK card that I didn't own, with nice Cardinal red borders. But Kile was a young rookie at the time, wearing the Astrodome-era Starter jacket.

Matt Morris will go down as one of the great starting pitchers in team history, at least with how I'd document it. This is from a 1998 Score Rookie/Traded set.

Here's another DK card, which also happens to be from the year end 2000 Topps offering.

Erik Pappas was way ahead of the curve as far as trendy hairstyles go.

In the second package, I offered to send a David Wright jersey card (it's in the mail tomorrow, I swear!) in exchange for a couple of "lame" Cardinals "hits". He was kind enough to toss in a few extras, including my first ever 2009 Topps Chrome card. It's been a lost season for Troy Glaus, whose current target is to rejoin the team sometime in mid-September as a pinch-hitter after missing the entire season so far. Last year Glaus not only drove in nearly 100 runs but also provided some surprisingly good defense at the hot corner.

The first Lame Hit is a Brian Esposito on-card autograph from the 2007 '52 Rookies set. Esposito was a journeyman minor leaguer who played exactly one inning with the disasterous 2007 team. Right now it looks like he's the backup catcher with the Round Rock Express. I imagine this is what Erik Pappas would look like if he was a circa-2007 backup catcher instead of a circa-1993 backup catcher.

Here's a great looking card, even if it looks like Rico signed a piece of Scotch tape rather than a baseball card. Washington made the opening day roster last season but currently plays for the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions of the Chinese Professional Baseball League according to his Wikipedia page, although he is not shown on the roster here. (Kevin, help me clear this up!)

Uh oh. Don't say things like that!